As my performance of “Confessions Of a SunYeo” for Boston-WiP approaches, I’m slowly putting the various pieces together. For this post, I’ll focus on the movement aspect of this work.
Movement has not always been an area of focus in my art practice. Even though my visual work is often made through particular movements with my arm, movement wasn’t something I thought about deliberately. Until I started to realize that I had to insert myself, bodily, into my work.
When I was six years old and had just arrived in Nairobi, Kenya, I stopped talking. My mom often reminds me that when I first started school, I was mute for 2 months. My teacher worried. My mom worried. So I was sent during lunch recess to a ballet class, taught by a teacher who visited the school once a week to introduce ballet to the students. I continued to study with this teacher long after I started speaking again.
I have often talked about how drawing saved me during these early months when I was struggling to adapt to a new place, but I believe that dance saved me too. There is something freeing about moving without having to speak.
I gave up ballet when I was 11 years old, a decision I often regret. So I returned to ballet as an adult. No longer quite as agile as I once was, I struggle during my weekly classes to master some of the basics, but at the same time, some of it comes back to me from my childhood, and because of those moments when I feel free as I once felt, I persist.
What I’m creating for “Confessions Of a SunYeo” isn’t ballet. I’m drawing on traditional Korean dance movements and creating movements through my own instincts and natural tendencies. This is new territory for me. It’s not an easy process by any means and I’m struggling often. But it’s forcing me to dig deep and to approach my body and my movements with purpose.
There is so much movement in your work! Adding the movement of your body, and the texture and cut and movement of the fabric-- all the energy of those additional layers-- So Much To Say! Oh it would be wonderful to see it in person.